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Gender Norms
Sisum, now age 26, comes from a wealthy family, but Samtse’s 500 or so r esidents are mostly illiterate and poor. Her education and exposure to new norms in rapidly urbanizing Thimphu have clashed with her father’s expectation of keeping traditional village practices. In one world, Sisum was raised to conform to strict gender codes of subordination and respect for her father’s authority; yet, simultaneously in the city, her other world, she was exposed to changing expectations about the proper roles and conduct for a girl and her father. Sisum will shortly complete her engineering degree and is determined to find a way to help change the traditions in her village. She knows about organizations that work on women’s and children’s rights in Thimphu, but they have yet to reach places like Samtse. In some respects, Sisum’s life straddles the 97 communities in our dataset. Overall, the communities in our study closely adhere to norms prescribing what women and men are expected to do, particularly when it comes to the division of domestic and breadwinner roles in the household. And these productive and reproductive gender role differences are mirrored and replicated at the wider community level. Change is happening, but at a very slow pace. The data show incremental and uneven changes in gender roles and norms, and a diversity of forces driving these transitions. On one hand, norms are being modified by negotiation and adaptation by men and women in response to new, emerging views on gender equality (box PI.1). Wider forces are also driving change, including new legislation, education achievement, communications technology, and many others. On the other hand, change is resisted in both discourses and practices. As discussed in chapter 2, domestic violence, in many cases seen as a man’s right over his wife, occurs as a reaction to challenges to the norm; but widely held beliefs and everyday practices like dinner rules also change. If young Sisum is confused by certain traditions in her family or how she ought to behave with her father, she is not alone. Sometimes uncertainty can be an advantage for flouting traditions that no longer make sense. And sometimes uncertainty about acceptable conduct creates space for disagreement and v iolent enforcement of the norm. Ridgeway and Correll (2004) note that beliefs in gender stereotypes are so resilient that descriptive attributes of the “typical” man or woman have remained stable since the 1970s.2 Chapter 1 reveals a similar finding: the focus groups’ reports of the traits associated with the ideal “good wives,” “good husbands,” “good girls,” and “good boys” are remarkably constant across countries and locations, and have remained largely unchanged, compared to previous g enerations. However, as shown throughout this report (particularly chapter 2), in everyday practices, there is more margin for negotiation, despite adherence to the ideal, and change is inescapable as more women participate in labor markets and more husbands help out at home. By definition, social norms are accompanied by surveillance and sanctioning practices to ensure compliance, ranging from community pressure for expected behaviors to explicit enforcement by violence. Women’s and men’s constant accountability to conform to norms has implications for their agency and ability to take action. On Norms and Agency • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-0-8213-9862-3